what a book! and to read it by coincidence in the weekend of Easter! too bloody for me at times but not less reliable alternative for the story of Jesus then the version we "know". All the characters are so human. no one is just godly or just a traitor. my favorite character was Kajafas' wife.

I am tempted to give this five stars to help balance many of the one-star reviews by people who somehow accidentally found themselves reading a book by a non-Christian for the first time and were traumatized and enraged by the unfamiliar experience. Honestly, read the one-star reviews just for laughs. Naomi Alderman retells the story of Israel under Roman occupation and beset by false messiahs, both religious and military. Being Jewish, Alderman does not believe that Jesus was a god and this no

The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman is a "creative" retelling of life in Israel under Roman occupation and early on centers on Jesus. Alderman's crafting of words is superb so it's quite disappointing that she put her talent to work slandering a public figure in such an offensive manner.In the novel we are exposed to the viewpoints of Mary, Barabbas, and Judas as imagined by Alderman. I can get behind historical fiction wherein we take a real place or course of events to set the scene and slide

A historical novel depicting Yehoshuah (the historical Jesus) through the eyes of four different people who encountered him: his mother Mary, Judas Iscariot, the high priest Caiaphas, and the criminal/revolutionary Barrabas, whom the crowd demanded be set free in place of Yehoshuah prior to Yehoshuah's crucifixion. (In this book, one can't speak of "The" Crucifixion with a capital C, since there are crucifixions left and right.)This book was artfully constructed and very competently written. Rel...

It was an interesting idea, writing a book about Jesus from a Jewish perspective, but I was very disappointed. The first century characters so obviously belonged in the 21st. None of the characters were believable and the character development was stale and predictable. Miriam (Mary) was the most interesting story, but the other three characters (Judah aka Judas, Bar Avo aka Barabbas, and Caiaphas) as well as their stories all fell flat. The cursing and the sexuality in the story so distracted f...

Naomi Alderman's new novel, The Liars' Gospel is defintely not a book for everyone. The book is set in the first century and centered around the life of a Jewish prophet, Yehoshuah (Jesus to us). Although it is ostensibly a retelling of the story of Jesus, I found Alderman's detailing of the political climate in Jerusalem during the rise and fall of Jesus much more interesting. The story is told from four viewpoints. That of Marym,Yehoshuah's mother, His friend and follower Ieudah of Queriot, th...

This book is brilliant. I am a deep lover of the time period, so I stand biased, but Naomi Alderman's reimagination of the period, weaving of actual historical reports (I am hard-pressed to call anything "fact" when the experts so vehemently disagree) and novelist projections, is riveting (to me). I will think of her rendition for a long time.I know I read her Orange Award winning book, Disobedience, when it came out, but did not record it on Goodreads. I loved how she interspersed some LGBT roo...

Honestly nearly rated this five stars. It's excellent. Read it.I have quite a number of retellings of the Christ myth, so if I tell you that this may be the best, even better than The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ, believe it is good. It says something so widely overlooked and even forgotten but so obvious - this is a Jewish story. In traditional Jewish communities, where the rituals and observations and practice in everyday life is kept alive, as it was without change for millennia, t...

I truly loved this book. The writing is magnificent, her characters are incredibly fleshed out with their own voices. Miryam, mother of Yehoshua. Mourning, keening, melodramatically loving her firstborn son. Even as I shook my head, I completely sympathized with her mother's love. You know the type, she loves her son despite his faults. When he turns away from her she misses him. She mourns his loss when he leaves home; long before he is hung on the cross. I felt her sorrow and her love. It crus...

Naomi alderman has written an intriguing account of events and people surrounding Jesus. In so doing she has made biblical figures that are sometimes perceived as one dimensional characters and turned them into ones we can relate to, with depth and conflict and imperfection. Although at times it felt sacrilegious reading some points of view such as the Iehuda from Qeriot, it made you see how Jesus could have been perceived, at the time, in a negative but credible way; a rock star that started to...

BABT70 years after the storming of Jerusalem's walls, a mother mourns her preacher son's death BBC blurb - In her new novel, the award-winning writer Naomi Alderman provides a compelling and challenging fictional account of life in Roman-occupied Judea. Her novel begins in 63 BC with Pompey's Roman army assailing the fortifications of Jerusalem, and ends with the bloodshed of the Jewish-Roman war in the first century CE.Within this context of Roman brutality and Jewish insurrection, Alderman pre...

"And in the midst of all that, one preacher by the name of Jesus died. And either something miraculous happened or someone lied."This is not the story of Yehoshuah (Jesus)but of the way his existence affected those around him. It is an often bloody tale of a people under Roman occupation, told from the perspectives of Miryam (his mother), Iehuda (a follower), Caiaphas (High Priest of Jerusalem) and Bar-Avo (rebel and murderer).The first half of the book is sublime. Miriam's feelings of betrayal,...

I thought I was going to like this - that's why you checked it out of the library Paul you dumbdumb - but I REALLY liked it! A piece of historical fiction set in the time of Roman occupied Judea, early in the first century CE. Before the first of four parts begin there is an introduction that perfectly sets the tone for much of what lies ahead: The ritual sacrifice of a lamb in the Jerusalem temple (that's THE Temple of course, Herod the Great's rebuilt version of King Solomon's earlier destroye...

An interesting take on a part of human history where myth and history collide. There are people, like Julius Caesar, whom we know existed, and about whom we know a fair amount. And then there are people like Helen of Troy, lost to pre-history, who as likely as not, never existed. Jesus of Nazareth is perched awkwardly between these two places, and to my mind, this made Naomi Alderman's story about life in Roman-occupied Jerusalem a quite haunting novel about how stories and myths come to be and

There's something a bit WOLF HALL-ish about what Alderman is up to here, in taking the story of Jesus and telling it from a defiantly secular, Jewish perspective. The four narrators are all known by their Jewish names, Miryam (Mary), Iehuda of Qeriot (Judas Iscariot), Caiaphas, and Bar-Avo (Barabbas), while Jesus is consistently referred to as Yehoshuah. Yehoshuah borrows a lot of old rabbinical teachings (the Golden Rule is not original to Christianity) mixed with a few visionary notions ("Love...

"Liars' Gospel" blew me away. Once I picked it up, I was hard pressed to put it down. Historical novels as well as novels about religion fascinate me, and Alderman does such a great job of capturing the time period in such a way as to make the reader feel as if it's familiar. The story of Jesus/Yehoshuah as told from the point of view of four Jews is such a different way of looking at the story. In two of the sections, Yehoshuah is almost a minor character until you realize how heavily he has in...